Thanks for Everything: The Disappearance of Celina Janette Mays

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

July 20, 2024

Celina Janette Mays was twelve years old in December 1996, living with her father, C.J. Mays, an accountant, along with her stepmother and other relatives at a home on Crestview Drive in Willingboro, New Jersey. Celina was biracial, five feet tall, a hundred twenty pounds, with black hair worn very long and wavy, brown eyes, and eyebrows that grew together. Her mother had died of a brain aneurysm in 1994, two years before Celina disappeared, leaving her father to raise her within a tight knit, deeply religious extended family. Celina was home schooled inside that community, and by the fall of 1996 she was nine months pregnant, with a due date landing around December 29, roughly two weeks after the night she vanished.

On December 15, 1996, Celina spent the evening with her family, attending church together and sharing ice cream afterward, an unremarkable, even pleasant evening by every account family members later gave investigators. Her stepmother later recalled that before Celina went to bed around eleven o'clock that night, she said, thanks for everything, a small, ordinary sounding goodnight that would later take on far more weight as the last words anyone in the family remembered hearing from her.

A Bed Made to Look Slept In

The next morning, when someone went to check on Celina, she was gone. Whoever had arranged her bed before she disappeared had gone to real trouble to disguise her absence, placing pillows beneath the blankets in a shape meant to look like a sleeping child, a detail that immediately told investigators this had not been a spontaneous, unplanned departure. Celina left behind her purse, her personal belongings, and her prenatal vitamins, medication she would have needed daily in the final stretch of a pregnancy just weeks from full term. Her father reported her missing that same day.

A Refusal to Name the Father

At the center of the investigation from its earliest days sat an uncomfortable, unresolved question: who was the father of Celina's child. Celina had refused for months to identify him, a silence that put her at odds with her father, who had reportedly threatened to pursue a paternity test to determine who had impregnated his daughter when she was only eleven years old. That threat gave investigators one obvious, if painful, theory: that Celina might have run away specifically to avoid a paternity test that could have exposed the identity of the man responsible for her pregnancy, whether out of fear, shame, or an effort to protect someone from consequences.

Investigators moved quickly to rule out one obvious possibility close to home. C.J. Mays's own physician confirmed to police that he had undergone a vasectomy years before Celina's pregnancy, definitively ruling him out as the child's father. That confirmation did not resolve the case, but it redirected suspicion elsewhere, including toward the extended family and the religious community the Mays family was deeply embedded in.

A Church With, in One Relative's Words, a Dark Side

C.J. Mays was a member of Gospel of Christ Ministries, a Pentecostal church based in Mount Holly, New Jersey, where his own sister, Cerita Smith, served as pastor. Investigators have long suspected that the church itself, or people connected to it, may have played some role in what happened to Celina, suspicion serious enough that it has remained part of the case's active theories for more than two decades. Celina's sister, Nora, later described the church publicly as having what she called a dark side, telling reporters that their aunt effectively dictated their parents' marriage and that their parents lived in a kind of fear of her, even while insisting that her parents had genuinely tried to help Celina through her pregnancy rather than punish her for it. Concerns about Pastor Cerita Smith eventually led to the church's membership being revoked from the larger Christ Gospel Ministries International organization it had belonged to, and Gospel of Christ Ministries in Mount Holly has since closed entirely.

Despite that suspicion, investigators were never able to search either the church or the Mays family home as thoroughly as they wanted. A judge denied police a warrant to search the home, and early questioning of family members was reportedly complicated by concerns that some of the interviews had been conducted in a biased or leading way, undermining their usefulness as the investigation moved forward.

One Uncertain Sighting

In more than twenty five years of investigation, authorities have logged over 250 individual leads in Celina's case, and yet only a small handful ever amounted to anything resembling a genuine sighting. Police have pointed to a possible sighting of a girl resembling Celina at a local Sizzler restaurant in January 1997, roughly a month after she vanished, though that lead was never definitively confirmed as Celina herself. A separate reported sighting in Howell, New Jersey, was investigated and ultimately determined to involve a different girl entirely, not Celina. No confirmed trace of Celina, or of the baby she was expecting to deliver within weeks of her disappearance, has ever surfaced in the decades since.

A Case Still Actively Pursued

The case received renewed national attention in September 2022, when it was featured on the Investigation Discovery program In Pursuit with John Walsh, part of an ongoing effort to generate fresh tips from viewers who might recognize details of the case even decades later. If Celina is alive today, she would be in her late thirties, and the child she was carrying, if born and still living, would now be in their mid twenties, an entire generation removed from the December night their mother vanished before either of them had the chance to be seen by anyone outside their family again.

More than twenty seven years later, Celina Janette Mays's case remains formally unsolved, its central unanswered question, who fathered her child and what role, if any, her family's church played in her disappearance, still exactly that: unanswered. What the investigation has produced instead is a portrait of a deeply insular religious community, a family split between competing theories of flight and abduction, and a twelve year old girl who said thanks for everything before bed on an otherwise ordinary December night and was gone by morning, her absence disguised carefully enough that whoever arranged those pillows clearly did not want anyone to notice right away.

The two competing theories that have shadowed the case since 1996, that Celina ran on her own to avoid exposing her child's father, or that someone inside her own family or church took her to prevent that same exposure, are not actually so far apart. Both center on the same unresolved secret, a name Celina never gave up to anyone who has spoken publicly about the case, and both leave investigators chasing the same missing piece more than two decades on. Whether Celina walked out of that house herself, arranging her own bed to buy time before anyone noticed, or whether someone else did it for her while she was carried out unable to protest, is a distinction that has never been settled, and may never be, unless she or her child is finally found.

Anyone with information about Celina Janette Mays's disappearance is asked to contact the Willingboro Police Department at 609-877-2253 or the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children at 1-800-843-5678.

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